A Friends-Only Way to Create and Share for Snapchatters Under 16

At Snapchat, nothing is more important than enabling all members of our community to express themselves authentically and in a setting grounded in real friendship, safety, and privacy. That’s especially important for teens.

That’s why we’re beginning to roll out a new experience for Snapchatters ages 13–15: they’ll be able to create, save, and showcase Stories and Spotlight videos on a dedicated profile that is visible only to their mutually accepted friends. Content from Snapchatters in this age group will no longer be distributed to non-friend audiences on Spotlight.

For younger teens, we believe the default should be a more private sharing experience. This update is part of our broader approach to building age-appropriate protections directly into Snapchat so teens can be creative, and sharing stays centered on real friendships.

Previously, Snapchatters under 16 could only post to Spotlight, our public, short-form video platform without attribution to their profile. This allowed teens to participate, while helping to protect them from potentially unwanted contact that can come with public posting. 

Now, we’re evolving this experience. Snapchatters under 16 will have a dedicated profile where they can create, save, and showcase their favorite Stories and short-form Spotlight videos — visible only to their mutually accepted friends. Snapchatters in this age group will no longer be able to post Spotlight content visible to non-friend audiences.

This new experience is designed to encourage creativity and self-expression within a trusted audience. It includes:

• Friends-only visibility: Content on their profile is only visible to mutually accepted friends — not one-sided “followers,” and not the wider Snapchat community.

• No favorite counts: Snapchatters under 16 don’t have metrics like favorites counts. 

• A place to showcase creativity: Snapchatters can showcase the Spotlight videos they create on their profile, giving them a way to collect their creativity in one place.

Our goal is to introduce sharing in a way that feels natural, gradual, and appropriate. This means that Snapchatters:

• Ages 13–15: Can create and share content in a low-pressure, friends-only environment.

• Ages 16–17: Have an optional introduction to public sharing, with additional safeguards, limited distribution, and parental visibility.

• 18+: Full access to public profiles and broader distribution tools.

In addition to these new content sharing protections, all teens under 18 on Snapchat have additional safety and privacy features, including:

• Strong default settings: We default key safety and privacy settings to the strictest standards for teens.

• Protections against unwanted contact: We have enhanced protections that prevent the delivery of friend requests from people you potentially do not know and we don’t allow teens to be messaged by anyone they haven’t added as a friend or have in their phone contacts. If we detect that a teen has accepted someone as a friend that we think they may not know, we send warnings if they start to chat, and encourage them to consider reporting or blocking the person contacting them. 

• A moderated content experience: We pre-moderate public content before it can be recommended to a broad audience, and proactively find and crack down on public accounts that may try to market inappropriate content to teens.

• Snapchat Family Center: Parents and caregivers can gain valuable insights and support their teen on Snapchat with our-in app tool, Family Center. With Family Center, parents can see their teens’ friends list, and who they’ve communicated with recently; set content restrictions; disable access to our My AI chatbot; share location as a family; and, report potentially concerning accounts on their teen’s behalf. 

Sharing moments with friends has always been at the heart of Snapchat. With these new content sharing protections for Snapchatters under 16, we’re reinforcing that foundation — giving younger teens a space to create, save, and express themselves, while keeping their world centered on the people who matter most: friends and family.

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